Large Hadron Concept Collider

As I work more and more on my nascent Eclipse Phase campaign, Second Star to the Right, it is becoming obvious that my typical creative process has come along for the ride.

There are lots of different kinds of creativity. I seem to recall that a class I took in college covered several of them, but I’ll be damned if I can remember jack shit about it now. The most important thing is that I know how my kind of creativity works, and it basically goes like this:

Hey, I like Thing A!

Ooh, I also like Thing B.

I bet they would be even better together.

Then I take Thing A and Thing B, I stick ’em in my brain, and I run them into each other at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light. The resultant fusion of the two things, alongside the host of exotic idea matter and blistering conceptual energies produced as a byproduct, then gets some time to cool before I put on my lead-lined trousers and get to work.

I am very lucky that Eclipse Phase is the sort of setting where you can pretty much find a way to slot anything in. I’m also very fortunate that it is a place where the various factions have such pronounced ideological motives. It means that creating my own groups to inhabit the post-Fall solar system is incredibly easy. A lot of the time it’s a matter of looking at one organization and thinking, “Yes, but there should be a group that is exactly the opposite. Is there? No? Then I shall will one into existence.”

I’m also thankful for The Stars Our Destination for giving me a kind of template showing how large communities in Eclipse Phase tend to glom together into myriad subcultures.

Frankly, without The Stars Our Destination, I never would’ve conceived of Second Star to the Right at all. Well, I might have, but it certainly wouldn’t have been anything like what it’s turned out to be now.

Second Star is turning out to be a bit more complex than my usual supercollider process, though. This is only natural, given the breadth of what I have planned. At the moment I’m cribbing from all kinds of stuff, including but not limited to:

Outlaw Star

Kill la Kill

Terminator

Mass Effect

An EP adventure called “Lurking in Every Flower”

The concept of procedural generation

Pulp adventure stories

Shadowrun

Firefly

Iron Chef (yes, you read that right)

Cowboy Bebop

Alongside a whole bunch of my own stuff that I’ve cannibalized and redigested so it slots neatly into the Eclipse Phase setting.

Oh, that’s another part of my creative process: the reiteration of old ideas and characters until they either bore me or find a nice, comfortable place to live. For reference, there will be characters appearing in Second Star who I first conceptualized in the year 2000 of the Common Era.

What can I say? I like to be economical. Also, re-using characters is environmentally friendly!

The current plan is to finish up “Les Fleurs du Mal” from Horror on the Orient Express this month, and then sometime in August will be the first session of Second Star. Then we’ll just switch back and forth as the whim strikes!